Ricky Hunley

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Until he retired from the UA's athletic equipment office, Bill Hawkins insisted that no UA football player ever be issued jersey No. 89.

The school did not retire Ricky Hunley's number, but Hawkins did.

Alas, on media day 1991, with Hawkins no longer protecting the sacred jersey, punter Adam Grand began a procession of 89s that has included Sy'Gerry Cook, James Hugo, Bobby McCoy and now Derick Barkum.

The school has missed an opportunity to market Hunley's Hall of Fame career, but that's not the way he perceives it.

"When I watch the Wildcats, I don't see a No. 89 and think about it," he was saying Thursday. "It's not the number, it's what the guy wearing the number does that leaves the legacy."

On Saturday, for the first time since he attended his school's 28-7 shocker over No. 4 SMU in 1984, ol' No. 89 will be a game-day spectator at Arizona Stadium. He has returned to Tucson to be honored today; the Southern Arizona chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame will pay tribute to his UA career in a luncheon at the Tucson Convention Center.

His legacy is fully intact.

"Ricky was so good that he actually made me look good," says John Kaiser, a Tucson businessman who played with Hunley on the '81 and '82 UA teams and later played for the Seattle Seahawks and the Buffalo Bills. "Every time we needed a big play, Ricky seemed to come through."

Whether or not Hunley is the best UA football player of the last 100 years often leads to a useless debate. Could it be Art Luppino or Tom Greenfield? Chris McAlister or Eddie Wilson? At the end of every debate, it can be said Hunley is the only Wildcat in the College Football Hall of Fame.

"The thing about Ricky is that he wasn't lacking in anything," says Chris Allen, an Arizona linebackers coach and defensive coordinator from 1980 to 1986. "He had speed, quickness, size, strength and the instinctive ability to anticipate a play. What else is there?"

There is personality, and it was Hunley's persona that set him apart as he became Arizona's first two-time consensus All-American and Pac-10 defensive player of the year.

In 1983, Cheryl Smith, wife of late UA head coach Larry Smith, invited Hunley to speak to her "Football for Women" class, which attracted about 400 football-loving females.

"It was my birthday, and for the occasion someone had baked me a pie," Cheryl remembers. "Well, two years earlier, on the day I turned 38, Larry gave me a game ball in the locker room. Ricky came up to me and said, 'Are you really 38? … My mom's 38,' as if to suggest it was ancient. So I remembered that.

"In front of all those women, I put that pie in his face."

And Hunley laughed louder than anyone.

"Ricky's personality served him well," Cheryl says. "The kids and the coaches responded to him. He became like a son to us."

This is Hunley's first season out of football in 30 years. After a coaching career at Missouri and Florida and with the Cincinnati Bengals and the Washington Redskins, he has relocated to Southern California to decompress.

He turns 47 next month and is married to an attorney; they have two teen-age daughters, both of whom, he cheerfully adds, are honor students. He is careful to choose where and when he wants to re-enter football.

"Sitting out this season is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but there is a reward," he says. "I'm able to be with my family and reach a full appreciation of what they mean to me. But I'll coach again. That's what I do best."

Hunley's first jersey, his high school No. 89, was retired after he led the Petersburg High School Crimson Wave to the 1979 Virginia state football championship. It is on display in the school's trophy case.

It was (and remains) a compelling story because Hunley was unable to play in 1978, his junior season, idled by a lower back injury.

When I visited the Hunley family in Virginia in late summer 1983, his mother, Scarlette, told me that she once hoped Ricky would never play football again.

"One day I watched Ricky limp all the way home from high school," she said. "Every step he took, a tear dropped from my eye. I insisted Ricky wouldn't play any more football. But he had it in his heart to play, and I didn't have it in me to stop him."

Today, long overdue, Hunley returns to Tucson to celebrate his 1998 selection to the Hall of Fame.

"It doesn't matter how long it took," he says. "I have only happy memories of being a Wildcat."